Oh, shit indeed! Maris blinked and stared into space, looking as she thought somebody with database chips and maps and languages planted in their head might look, and then said, "Looks all right to me, but then why wouldn't it? Rezerval doesn't have any more detailed maps of this area than you do."
"I thought the satellite scans might show some details of the terrain."
"Well, they don't," Maris said. "They're really not very clear at all. Sorry I can't help you and all that." She took the stick Gabrel had been pointing with, thrust it into the bubbling mess in the cook-pot on the fire, and stirred vigorously—perhaps a little too vigorously; the stuff slopped over and a few drops sizzled on the hot stones.
"Better let me do that," Gabrel said, dropping the map to rescue their dinner.
"I'm not much help to you, am I?"
"Well," Gabrel said, stirring the pot almost as vigorously as she had done, "it's not supposed to work that way, is it? I've been assigned to help you. Anyway, I don't suppose a Diplo's normal training covers situations quite this primitive."
"You could say that," Maris allowed. For sure she couldn't contradict it, anyway!
"And I think you more than did your share on this trip the night we started," Gabrel added.
"I—? Oh, that." Maris suppressed an internal shudder as she remembered the soft mushy place her rock had left in Kaspar Slevinen's skull. She averted her gaze from the anonymous glop boiling in the cooking pot.
"Saving my life," Gabrel said with a straight face, "is usually good for one ticket into upcountry Kalapriya, all expenses paid, pack beasts managed, meals prepared, and tents erected. And you didn't even use any of your special weapons! You Rezerval types take this tech prohibition seriously, don't you?"
"Oh. Ummm . . ." Of course, a real Diplo would have done something much more elegant than bashing Slevinen over the head with a rock. Maris looked for a way to change the subject. "Would that be a one-way ticket, or round trip?"
"You don't think I can bring us out safely?"
"I've no worries at all about that," she lied, "just wondering whether I would have to save your life again in Udara or else learn to lead ghaya and set up me own—my own tent."
"I'd enjoy watching you attempt the latter," Gabrel said, "but the ghaya might not like it! Let's agree that you've earned a free ticket back to Valentin. Although if there is any useful information in those satellite maps in your head, to supplement my trail notes, I'd appreciate your sharing it. For instance, how do they show the elevation of Dharamvai? I'd estimated it at about six thousand meters, when I was there treating with the Vakil, but of course I was restricted to the kind of prehistoric measurement instruments allowed under the technology prohibitions. I'm sure your mapping programs are much more accurate. How high above sea level would you say the city lies?"
"Oh, six thousand sounds like a pretty good estimate," Maris mumbled. Time for another change of subject. "Is that stuff ready yet? I'm so hungry I could eat a ghay!"
"I wouldn't recommend it," Gabrel said, "the meat tastes really sour. Something about the native grasses they eat. Or does your training as a Diplomat include a course in swallowing anything you're offered with a smile? You never have told me much about your studies. What exactly do Diplomats learn in that school?"
"Umm. It's mostly classified," Maris offered wildly. "Y'know, don't want to give away our systems and all that."
"Including what you had for dinner?"
"Ahh, just the usual. You know." At least she hoped he did. Maris herself didn't have the faintest idea what toppies would eat in a fancy school, but she was pretty sure it didn't resemble the hodgepodge of dryfood stolen from shipping crates and odd dishes liberated from a Tasman dining hall on which Johnivans fed his gang. "I'd rather hear about how you found out that ghay meat tastes sour. I bet there's a story behind that?"
"Reconnoitering trip that went bad." Gabrel accepted the change of subject gracefully, leaned back against his bedroll, and launched into a tale of travels into uncharted territory, a native "guide" who'd never been more than a day's journey from his home village, and an early blizzard that effectively closed what he'd thought was the only pass back through the High Jagirs from their campsite.
Later that night, after the campfire was banked to a rock-encircled bed of slumbering embers and they had crawled into their separate tents, Gabrel lay awake with arms folded behind his head and considered the riddle of Calandra.
Basically, he liked the woman. She'd been a good companion so far on this journey upcountry, accepting the difficulties of travel without any of the whining he'd have heard from most of his colleagues in Valentin—and that was the men; he shuddered to think what a gently bred Barents lady, even one accustomed to the "hardships" of life in Valentin, would have made of a trip by turag, native packet boat, and foot into the foothills of the Jagirs. And—remembering that last night in Valentin—she was a damned good companion to have at one's back in a fight. Quick reflexes; if it had been up to him, they'd both have been trussed helpless in the tanglenet before he knew what was happening. Not that Slevinen would have left him alive long enough to be embarrassed by his stupidity, but that was scant comfort. Well, she was an offworlder and a Diplomat; she was used to watching for high-tech weaponry. He hadn't expected any such thing. No, that was no excuse, not after reading Orlando Montoyasana's letters about the prohibited technology he'd stumbled on in Udara. The fact was, he hadn't taken Montoyasana seriously, hadn't taken the whole mission seriously until Slevinen's attack on them. Putting that together with the trader's tale of the two Barents Society men who'd tried to cut them off at the junction of the Dharam-jara and the Vaisee-jara, Gabrel no longer had any doubt that there was something in the mountains that somebody didn't want them to find. And given Slevinen's use of a tangler, it seemed very likely that Montoyasana had been exactly right about what was going on in Udara.
What was keeping Gabrel awake tonight, though, was his inability to figure out what was going on right here and now with Calandra . . . if that was really her name! From the first she had not been what he expected in a Diplomat; but then, one of the things you expected was that Diplos would keep you off balance. So he had deliberately not worried about the fact that she seemed too young and innocent, and talked too bluntly, to be a Rezerval-trained Diplo. That could have been part of the training, a way to keep you off guard.
And on that day of her arrival, he'd hardly had time to think about it much. What with formal dinners, ball gowns, and assassination attempts, not to mention scrambling to get out of Valentin at least half a step ahead of whoever had it in for them, the occasional oddities in Calandra's behavior had been the least of his worries.
The days of travel, though, had given him time to observe . . . and think.
Calandra definitely did not behave like anything Gabrel had heard of Diplos. Put that down to his ignorance, if you would; but how could you explain the way she changed the subject whenever he asked anything about her background and training? And since she wouldn't tell him anything, what could he go on but the rumors that passed for common knowledge?
Diplos were supposed to have chips in their heads that could be loaded with the basics of any language they were likely to need. Calandra herself admitted that, but her statement that the language downloads weren't all they might be was a gross understatement. She spoke Kalapriyan, as the trader had pointed out, like a four-year-old or worse. And she seemed to spend all her spare time muttering verb conjugations.
Diplos toured many different worlds and were exposed to many varied civilizations before they graduated into active assignment work; Calandra reacted to the sights of Kalapriya like a kid who'd never seen anything outside the four walls of a study cubicle.
Diplos carried weapons unlike anything you'd ever imagined secreted on their persons and in their clothes; Calandra had bashed Kaspar Slevinen's head in with a handy rock. Wasn't there such a thing as carrying respect for prohibited technology a bit too far?
&nb
sp; Was she some impostor posing as a Diplo? Obviously there were some Barents Trading Society people involved in the transfer of prohibited weapons to Udara; could they have disposed of the real Calandra Vissi and substituted one of their offword accomplices? Would such a woman have been cold-blooded enough to murder Slevinen—a coconspirator of hers, according to this thesis—just to establish her credibility in Gabrel's eyes?
Some women might. All Gabrel's experience of Calandra, though, said that she wasn't capable of such an act.
Besides—he remembered with relief—she had to have passed the routine spaceport ID checks in transit to Kalapriya. She had Calandra Vissi's retinas, fingerprints, and DNA. Gabrel shook his head. No, whatever the woman was or wasn't, she had to be Calandra Vissi of Rezerval. Pure logic, Occam's Razor, dictated against multiplying improbabilities in the service of his private paranoia; to suppose this woman an impostor was piling impossibility upon improbability.
So what was she? Perhaps a Diplomat in training, posing as a full graduate to improve her standing on Valentin. Someone who hadn't had the final tours yet, hadn't been issued the mysterious weapons, maybe didn't even have all the implant chips necessary to download languages and maps.
Gabrel chuckled quietly to himself. Yes, that made sense. Orlando Montoyasana's reputation as the galaxy's most paranoid and quarrelsome anthropologist had preceded him to Kalapriya. Probably the man had been pestering Rezerval for years, complaining about every world he studied. They weren't going to waste a real Diplo on a mission purely for show, to placate a crazy anthropologist; they'd use it as a training mission for one of the students.
And, of course, they wouldn't feel it necessary to mention to Montoyasana—much less to the Barents Trading Society—that the kid they were sending out wasn't a real Diplo.
Unfortunately, it seemed that she'd stumbled into a real conspiracy. So what was he going to do about it? Head back to Valentin and demand a real Diplo, and preferably a contingent of Rezerval Guards, to investigate Udaran weaponry? With what that trader had said of Barentsians hunting for him, Gabrel had serious doubts as to whether they'd even get back to Valentin, much less get access to the ansible to contact Rezerval.
Pushing ahead seemed the better of the two alternatives. Anyway, if Gabrel had taken Montoyasana's complaints seriously, he wouldn't have wasted his time going back to Valentin and whining for a Diplo's assistance, would he? No, he would have started investigating on his own, right there where he was in Dharampal—close enough to Udara, and with his good Dharampali friends to help him.
No reason he couldn't do the same thing now. The only difference was, Calandra's arrival had caused the conspirators inside the Barents Trading Society to tip their hand. After Slevinen's attack and the trader's warning, Gabrel knew he couldn't risk taking any evidence he discovered to his superiors in the Society—not until he knew exactly who was involved, and how.
Calandra would come in handy there too; with her contacts in the Diplomatic School, she could take his report directly to Rezerval and hand it over to authorities who would think nothing of arresting half a dozen top officials in the Society, who would have the resources to clean up the nasty mess of corruption and cultural contamination they seemed to be stumbling into.
All he had to do, Gabrel reckoned, was penetrate a hostile Indigenous Tribal Territory, collect evidence of their use of prohibited offworld technology, find some leads as to who was supplying the weapons, get himself and Calandra back to the coastal enclaves, and smuggle her off-planet to deliver the report. Without the backup that a fully trained and armed Diplo could have provided. He smiled grimly. Wasn't there a character in some ancient children's book who believed in doing six impossible things before breakfast? At least he didn't have to do all this before breakfast—and now he thought about it, the phrase had been "believe six impossible things before breakfast." Fine, he'd start by believing they could accomplish their tasks with no difficulty.
But as he drifted off to sleep, he wasn't worrying about the dangers ahead of him; a life of alternately soldiering and spying had taught Gabrel Eskelinen not to stay awake over next week's problems when there was a reasonably good chance tomorrow might kill you before you had to face them.
The one thing that really bothered him was that he wished, irrationally, that Calandra would trust him with the truth about herself.
Chapter Eleven
Udara on Kalapriya
"Name?" the Rudhrani guard at the gate of Pundarik Zahin's house snapped. That was a new thing; there'd been nobody barring the gate when he went there—was it only yesterday? It seemed like years ago.
"Vajjadara. Chulayen Vajjadara, with the Ministry for Lands and Properties," Chulayen said, head bowed. "If I could see the honorable general for just one moment?"
The guard sighed deeply. "What, does every two-tulai clerk in the Bashir's service have to talk to General Zahin before he goes into surgery? My master's been officially retired for years now, but you'd think no Ministry in Udara could function without him for a few days, the way you people have been pouring in with chits and last-minute requests."
"Surgery? I didn't know—" Chulayen stopped, started over. "Please, this is not a matter of government business. It is—my parents were friends of General Zahin's—I—we had words yesterday—I need to apologize before—"
The guard's expression softened. "Oh, personal, is it? I did hear as he was troubled by some quarrel yesterday. Would that have been you, then?"
"Yes," Chulayen said. "I was wrong. I wanted to apologize to him and tell him that I've seen my errors."
"Well, maybe it'll help him go in to the surgeon with a quieter mind, at that," the guard said. "But if you start arguing with him, I'll be sorry I let you in—and I'll make you even sorrier!"
"I only wish to express my humble duty and my complete submission to his judgment," Chulayen vowed.
He was shocked by the change in Pundarik Zahin's private rooms. The old, shady, dusty, cluttered study had been cleared of nearly all its furnishings, and a pair of servant girls was briskly scrubbing the floor on one side of the room while the old general sat in his invalid chair on the other side, irritably going through the stack of papers proffered by a clerk standing beside him. "Enough business for now!" he cried when Chulayen entered, pushing the papers away. "Tell the Ministers I'll be ready and happy to attend to them all in a few days, after we see how the outlander's medicine works. Well, my boy," he said to Chulayen in a softer tone, "I understand you've seen the error of your ways?"
"My loyalty has always been to the Bashir and to Udara," Chulayen said. "I deeply regret the misunderstanding which made me seem to be setting up my own will against the wiser judgment of the Minister for Defense, and my only hope is that the Bashir himself will understand and forgive my errors."
"Well said," Pundarik Zahin approved. "Perhaps—"
A bucket of water tipped over, sending a puddle splashing over the blanket that covered his legs, and he growled at the clumsy servant. "Wheel me out to the garden, boy, we can't talk in here. That crazy outlander!"
He continued his grumbles when Chulayen had maneuvered the clumsy wheeled chair out onto the paved, vine-shaded terrace overlooking the mountainside. "What is this mania outlanders have for cleaning and boiling and purifying everything? You'd think they were all born to be good Rudhrani housewives. Hah!" He laughed explosively at his own joke. "A little honest dirt never did any harm, and in our climate it's positively dangerous to strip the skin of its natural oils in the face of winter. At least that's how I was taught. But this man will have me scrubbed as raw as that room in there before he consents to treat me."
"It's outlander magic," Chulayen said. "I suppose we must allow them to cast out devils in their own way. What does he promise to do for you, sir?"
"Why, he thinks the devils are not in these useless things after all—" Zahin thumped one of his own legs "—but in my head, and he means to open up my head to let them out! Hah!" He laughed again, even more
loudly.
"Truly, sir?"
"No, it's more complicated than that. Best I can understand it, he says our heads are supposed to be full of tiny demons that send orders to our bodies, and that some of my demons died when I had an attack of the falling sickness. So he's going to open me up and put in some of his own demons who will direct the work of my legs." Zahin scowled. "Truth to tell, I don't much care to think of the details. It all seems very improbable. I've cleaved a man's skull with my own saber—aye, fifty years ago it was, in the battle for the Sarai Pass, but I remember as 'twas yesterday. Blood aplenty there was on the snow, and a spill of grey stuff where his head opened, but I saw no demons coming out. Still, the outlanders pay well enough for the demons he grows—" Zahin checked himself as though he just now remembered whom he was talking to. "I suppose you understand all about that business now, boy? Been explained to you, has it?"
"Not fully," Chulayen said carefully, "but I know that my duty and loyalty are to the Bashir, and I hope that you, sir, will convey my deepest apologies to him and to the Ministry for Loyalty and tell them—persuade them—" His throat closed up for a moment before he could go on. "There's no need to keep my family hostage, sir. Anusha, Vashi, the girls, they had no part in this. The fault was entirely mine, and I see now that I was entirely mistaken. Please, sir, cannot you persuade them to set my family free?"
Zahin looked off into the blue distances beyond the terrace, stroking his moustache with one hand. "I'm only an old soldier, Chulen, not a diplomat, and it's a chancy business to bargain with the Ministry for Loyalty. I came close enough to being called traitor myself yesterday, because I talked them into leaving you free and only taking the womenfolk."
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